four primary partitions?

linuxtesting2 · 05-03-2004, 05:07 PM

i was reading about fdisk in linux, and i see that you can have 4 primary partitions on 1 disk. With windows you can only have 1 primary partition, or am i wrong ? little confused

-ole

trickykid · 05-03-2004, 05:18 PM

You can have up to 4 primary partitions with any disk, if you want more than that, the 4th has to be made into an extended partition to create logical drives. In most cases Windows will create just one large drive or if you do split it up, the first will be a primary and the rest as logical...

PS. Moving to General, as this is not directly asking about Linux in any technical way.

david_ross · 05-03-2004, 05:19 PM

With windows you can have 4 primary partitions too - it is not really an OS dependant matter.

michaelk · 05-03-2004, 05:19 PM

It doesn't matter linux or windows you can have 4 primary partitions. From my experience windows will only create one primary as c: ( not including extended) and any additional partitions as logical drives i.e d:, e: ...

An extended parititon is a primary partition and in a nutshell is a container for logical partitions. You can create up to 64 partitions on an IDE drive.

Primary partition have an ID of 1-4, logical partitons are anything >=5.

Crito · 05-03-2004, 07:17 PM

You can only have one ACTIVE primary partition in DOS/Windows. Since DOS/Windows uses english letters to mount drives, you're also limited to 24 partitions (A and B are reserved.)

linuxtesting2 · 05-04-2004, 03:05 AM

ok, so i can have 4 primary in windows 2, but only 1 active primary ..right?

Crito · 05-04-2004, 11:17 AM

Originally the limit was four partitions total (there was no "primary" distinction.) Extended and logical partitions were invented to get around this limitation. So it's either four primary or three primary and one extended.